Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Peter O’Toole’s new beginning

‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote his time to finishing a third volume of memoirs, which will record the ‘meat’ of his Hollywood career. The two previous volumes — Loitering with Intent: The Child and Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice — stand largely unread on my bookshelves. I dip into them from time-to-time; they’re that sort of book. O’Toole is wonderful

Tuesday

J P O'Malley

Kevin Barry’s magic

Reading a short story by Kevin Barry is a bit like listening to a kraut-rock-record from the 1970s. The foundations are built on a solid rhythm. Then every so often, the form veers left-field, unveiling a portal to a world of magic. In this sense, you could argue that Barry is an experimental writer. He spends considerable time wrestling with language, bending each turn of phrase and piece of dialogue into shape, until he’s convinced he can make it sing. As far as modulating with the form itself, Barry works from tradition: giving his readers short vignettes of isolated individuals — mostly men, who have failed in one way or

Fleur Macdonald

Gray’s anatomy

Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have rearranged the furniture. Whenever a Banville character peers into the recesses of their mind — and introspection is the norm — they experience a similar feeling of disorientation. We last met Alexander Cleave in Eclipse when the former thespian had retreated to wandering around his late mother’s house in an attempt to gather his wits

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: The world according to Ben Jonson

from Timber ‘There is a Necessity all men should love their country: He that professeth the contrary, may be delighted with his words, but his heart is there. Natures that are hardened to evil, you shall sooner break, then make straight; they are like poles that are crooked, and dry: there is no attempting them. We praise the things we hear, with much more willingness, then those we see: because we envy the present, and reverence the past; thinking ourselves instructed by the one, and overlaid by the other. Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing, settled in the imagination; but never arriving at the understanding, there to

Anna Baddeley

Across the soft-porn pages

Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been bought for another purpose.   The Guardian dedicated their usually reliably highbrow Review section to the phenomenon, persuading some hilariously unexpected writers (Will Self! Jeanette Winterson! Lol!) to have a go at their own sex scenes. I couldn’t face reading them, but you can here. And if you’re really into masochism, here’s an angry blogpost

Saturday

The Spectator

Bookbenchers: Douglas Alexander MP | 7 July 2012

After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbencher interview returns. First up is Douglas Alexander, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South and shadow foreign secretary. He tells which books he’ll be reading this summer.  1) Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway — the recently published memoir of one of Scotland’s most controversial and colourful churchman on his life’s journey from faith to doubt. 2) Which book would you read to your children? As a family we have read and loved all the Katy Morag adventures set on the fictionalised Isle of Struay based on the actual Isle of Coll in the

James Mather

City breaks

The city might have been invented by the Ancient Mesopotamians, but for most of human history urban living has been a decidedly minority pursuit. For 1,000 years before 1800, only 3 per cent of the world’s people were city dwellers. Today that proportion has risen to more than one half and by 2050 it will touch three quarters. With these striking statistics P.D. Smith begins his journey into the urban age (which, it turns out, is all of history and a chunk of prehistory besides). Darting between continents and across millennia, he sets out to show how little the experience of urban living, working and playing ever really changes. Cultures

Anthony Sattin

Twists and turns through history

Jeremy Seal is a Turkophile, but don’t look to him for a grand history of the republic or lives of the Ottoman sultans. That is not his way. He prefers to approach things obliquely and, in particular, to come at them from an angle dictated by chance and beginning with a discovery. His first book, A Fez of the Heart, looked at Turkey and Turks through the prism of their most iconic piece of clothing: the fez. His previous book, Santa: A Life, was decided upon when he discovered that St Nicholas was a Turk. And now another discovery: the Meander. We all know the idea of meandering. The word,

Matthew Dennison

Old lovers…

If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own — Ancient Light contains ingredients certain to please Banville aficionados. ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions,’ the novel’s narrator tells us at the outset. On the instant we are transported back through four decades of Banville’s writing: ‘We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past,’ he

David Ekserdjian

Live on in paintings

Like all self-respecting geniuses, Raphael (1483-1520) died young at the age of 37. For over a decade, he had been based in Rome, and had enjoyed fame, wealth and success beyond the dreams of almost any other artist of the day (Leonardo and Michelangelo were his only rivals). His standing in the highest circles — and above all in the eyes of the Pope — meant he was accorded the unprecedented honour, for one of his artistic calling, of being buried in the Pantheon. Artistic celebrity of this order did not guarantee the preservation of biographical minutiae, however, and we know almost nothing about what Raphael was actually like. The

Richard Davenporthines

Preaching to the converted

Jonathan Franzen is a pessimist with a capacity for quiet joy. In a revealing passage in this collection of essays, reviews and speeches he writes of his fellow novelist Alice Munro: ‘She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion’. Explaining this, he apes the General Confession in a church service. Reading Munro makes him reflect ‘about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death’. The stealthy theme of Farther Away is Franzen’s secularised religiosity. He honours obscure priests of his

John Gimlette

A corner of every English field, forever foreign

The story of the English countryside is richly exotic. We’ve always known that foreigners have shaped this land: traders, settlers and, most importantly, invaders. But scratch the surface, and the detail is remarkable. Who’d have guessed that the so-called ‘Amesbury Archer’ (a 4,000-year-old corpse, found near Stonehenge) actually started life in the Alps? Or that Neolithic England was a hub of European trade? What’s more, archaeologists now think that our landscape was formed not by the Romans (as previously thought) but during the Bronze Age.Back then, a huge, mysterious and varied population had deforested the countryside, tamed it, tilled it and made themselves rich. All the Romans did was make

Andrew Petrie

From our own correspondent

‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland (Oneworld, £10.99), and, given that he has also observed the methods of warlords from Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, his word counts for something. Though he acknowledges the journalistic allure of ‘shouting into microphones over the din of exploding ordnance’, Bryant’s memoir of his time as Auntie’s man in South Asia (and Washington, and Sydney) is refreshingly free of the macho stuff. Instead, he is concerned with analysing (not to say justifying) the changes in news presentation during his time on our screens, from the growth of post-Diana ‘how do

Sarah Burton

Marilyn was murdered

In The Mill on the Floss, having been given a ‘petrifying’ summary of Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil by young Maggie, Mr Riley challenges Mr Tulliver with allowing his daughter access to such dangerous reading material. A perplexed Tulliver explains: Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale.They was all bound alike — it’s a good binding, you see — and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday’ (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy). ‘And there’s a lot more of

Sean Mcglynn

Revolutionary in spirit

A few years ago, a French reader congratulated me on my marvellous biography of Napoleon. Yes, I agreed, it’s a terrific read — an absolute blinder. But I had to be frank and reveal that, alas, I wasn’t Frank. I confess to being a little envious of my approximate namesake, Frank McLynn. A hugely successful popular historian who has the freedom to write on just about any subject he damn well pleases: Marcus Aurelius, the Burma campaign, the battle of Hastings, Jung, the Wild West. He even has a sideline on Hollywood greats. With some two dozen books to his name, he has clearly grasped the baton from Christopher Hibbert.

Friday

Anna Baddeley

The Spectrum – the week in books | 6 July 2012

UP: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE Faber’s new Shakespeare’s Sonnets app is rated 12+ on account of its ‘Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity’. After watching Andrew Motion’s  come-to-bed reading of Sonnet 142 we’re surprised it escaped an X-certificate. Who needs 50 Shades when you’ve got the third sexiest poet laureate (after Ben Jonson and Ted Hughes) wearing nothing but polka-dot pyjamas and braces? ‘Love is my sin’ indeed!     UP: 60s SUMMER READS Now’s the time of year when literary pages replace serious stuff like reviews with drivel about what famous people are reading on their holidays. A depressing symptom of our celeb-obsessed age, it’s tempting to think, but a glance

Rachel Halliburton

LA gangs, Arab feminists, and learning Classics

‘There are more people teaching Ancient Greek in China than there are in Britain,’ declares Professor Edith Hall from the distinctively academic chaos of her study at King’s College, London. ‘Now you can either wring your hands about this, or do what I intend to, and go and talk to them! At the Zhejiang University [one of China’s C9 universities, their Ivy league] they’re translating Greek philosophy — Plato and Aristotle. They’re also looking at ancient Athens with a view to instituting a big discussion about democracy. This is the next frontier for Western classics.’   Professor Hall is in a particularly strong position to appreciate the irony that while

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

A knight’s tale

I can’t help thinking that the literary editor is having a little chuckle to himself, in his own private way, as he hands me Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way to review. What he knows is that, for my sins, I have never been anywhere near the Pennine Way, the long stretch that runs from Edale, Derbyshire, to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border. And yet here it is in my hand, a travel diary of sorts, dedicated to Simon Armitage’s 2010 sweaty ramble ‘backwards’ from the Scottish end to his hometown, Marsden, situated near its beginning. Thankfully, neither familiarity with the moors nor a particular

Emily Rhodes

Out of the ashes | 5 July 2012

One of the saddest parts of a bookseller’s job is telling a customer that the book they want is out of print. This book is obviously very dear to them; more often than not they want a duplicate copy to give away to a friend or loved one. The eager, excited look in their eyes turns to disbelief, followed by slow grim acceptance, and then there’s the gradual setting in of mournful gloom.  Even if I offer to try to track down a second-hand copy, they often still find it hard to come to terms with the fact that this book – so dearly loved by them – wasn’t loved

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Cityboy

Geraint Anderson still has an axe to grind. Filthy lucre is corrupting public life, and the City’s casino banks continue to spoil all who come near them. Their venality is the subject of his latest book, Payback Time – of which he wrote in these pages last week. He is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he’s into (the Marquis de Sade) and what he’s not (Rick Santorum). He tweets @cityboylondon 1) What are you reading at the moment? William Golding’s Lord of the Flies…again 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? See above as well as page 72 of James Herbert’s The Rats